


Dust

by LegendaryBard



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, dark themes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-01-07 07:40:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12228516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LegendaryBard/pseuds/LegendaryBard
Summary: Roadhog knows too much.





	1. A Gravel Road

The outback seems almost transformed at night. 

For one thing, it’s not hot anymore. That’s a blessing. The day doesn’t seem to reflect the phrase ‘nuclear winter’ in the slightest. It’s still hot. It’s still Oz. 

Something rustles in the scrub bushes nearby. Dingo, maybe. They get pretty big these days. Pretty feral. Still shy around people. Twenty years was enough time for a lot of generations- but that fear of menfolk isn’t staved off so quick. Especially not now, when a dingo isn’t just shot at to protect livestock. It’s shot at for dinner, too.

“Y’hear that? Sounds like meat.” 

When you get deep in the outback, you can still see the stars. 

The fallout used to blot out the sky- day and night. Thick and grey. Like clouds. Like smog, over the suit’s version of Sydney. The sun was a tiny blip behind the curtain of slate. Almost like an afterthought. 

At first, there was dust choking the air so thick you couldn’t breathe. His lungs aren’t that good, from the initial exposure- used to smoke, too, in the Time Before, but it’s a dangerous habit to have. It’s desperately feeding branches into a fire to keep it alight instead of just burning, like the sun. Addiction. Nicotine or other drugs. Can’t do it. Addiction is a death sentence. Because once you can’t get your hit, you deal with getting  _ off  _ of it, and when you get off it, you’re dangerously close to dying. Even being in full health is dangerously close to dying. 

And, honestly, being alive is pretty nice. It’s better than dying, anyway.

“I could get it for ya. Bet’cha need a lot of meat to keep that figure going.” 

A whistle, an exaggerated drag of amber eyes over his form in a mocking parody of checking him out. A skinny elbow jabbed into taut gut flesh when he doesn’t seem to get it. A surge of annoyance that he lets go of with his next breath. Letting go of being pissed is like blowing out a birthday candle. Just breathe. 

There aren’t birthday candles anymore. Melted down or gnawed on or lost to time or scavenged by someone clinging to the Time Before, what-have-you. He wonders if his companion ever had a cake. One with candles. He doesn’t know how old the scrap mouse was when radioactive fire tore through the outback. Too young. But not born in the Time After- children post-explosion are mutated beyond belief or murdered. 

There are no kids anymore. None that aren’t jealously guarded by parents, locked up tighter than a loon in a crazyhouse. Or lost to the bush. It’s easy for a man to die out here. Even easier for a kid. 

Kids are an investment. You find a man, alone, dying of thirst, you help him and take his belongings. If he doesn’t have any, you take his labor. You find a kid, you help him, take his stuff, but a kid can’t do the same work a grown man can. Easier to let him die, pick him clean of whatever meager treasures a preadolescent can acquire, and leave him for the vultures. One less mouth to feed. And if you’re the long pork kind, a meal that isn’t yet sandy and toughened by harsh living and toil. 

“Oi! You listening?” 

His companion likes talking. Likes it way too much. 

He twitches and quivers. Constantly. Like he’s waiting for some trap to be sprung and he won’t be taken off guard. Sometimes he seems fidgety. Like he’s worried someone’ll come along and blow his head off. Other times it’s manic, impatient energy. Fingers tapping against his pantleg. Tugging at the roots of his golden, ash-dusted hair. Rubbing the pads of his fingers together to accrue dirt. Impatient gestures, he thinks. But he’s been with the little scrapper for two days, and that’s it. He doesn’t know him down to every tic. Just barely began to be able to distinguish his anxiety from his impatience. 

In the Time Before they’d give him medicine for his mania. Now all they can do is just not enable it.

He’s different in more ways than just his neurotic twitchiness. He’s thin. Which isn’t altogether weird, not in this hellscape. He’s thin  _ and _ tall. But his permanent slouch, his hunched over twitchiness. He constantly looks like a raptor hooding its kill. Or a dog, flinching before it’s hit. When he was first observed, he looked six foot, maybe six one. But when he stretches out- six eight, six nine, easily. Sinewy legs. Long belly with the defined cage of his ribs. Pencil neck. Lean horse face. He’s weedy. His tufts of fluffy hair have him looking like soot-smudged Pampas grass. 

He’s got a few golden teeth. Amber-yellow eyes, feral. A skinny scrap. Missing two limbs- on the same side. A sophisticated prosthetic for his arm. Definitely costed more than a  _ real  _ arm would fetch. He’s got a metal stick for his other leg. Like a pirate. Peglegged. Makes him walk a little awkwardly, at a hobble. Helps him look even shorter than his hunch, since his legs are different sizes. 

He likes explosives. Probably why he’s missing the right half of him. 

He likes jokes. Probably why he keeps joking about how he’s ‘not right’. 

He likes telling stories that can’t possibly be true. 

He likes pretending like he’s not a skinny little weasel who wouldn’t sell his mother’s soul to get out of a two dollar bar tab. The man’s just not a good person. But who is these days? Irradiation scorched any kindness out of the outback. Time scrubbed away any other dregs that the fallout missed.

“Uhhh, hel-loooo? You gone deaf?” 

His name is Jamison Fawkes. Colloquially, Junkrat. It’s an apt name. His twitching brings to mind rabies-infected rodents. The scrap-collecting, hoard-like tendencies. The squeaking bark of everything he says, sometimes pitched in mania or growled in fury. He’s carrying light- chest strapped with dual bandoleers of grenades, carrying a tire on his back like a marcher’s drum. He’s shirtless, showing off the pale stretch of his belly. Some patches are sprinkled with moles, cancerous colors, benign. Darkened with grime or discolored from a chemical spill. His pants are ragged, torn at the knees. They had possibly been a plain green at one point. Time made them faded, bleached from liquids or darkened with dust, smattered with the same material that smudges his skin. 

It’s amazing he hasn’t lost a hand- or his life- by now. A chemist needs a clean work environment. Proper tools. A steady hand. Knowledge gifted by school. There’s not a damn school for at least two hundred miles- not until you get to the coast. Not until you get to the safe cities, the sparse few that were spared irradiated hell due to their distance. 

_ Australian Liberation Front.  _ They had genuinely thought… 

His mind snaps back to Junkrat like a taut rubber band. It’s automatic. The ALF isn’t worth thinking about. 

Junkrat is the chemist’s version of a man brewing bathtub moonshine in a fifty year old sink. It’s rough. Approximate.  _ Will  _ probably kill you. 

But he still makes explosives, and ones that work, too. The scent of blasting powder hangs around Junkrat like a noxious cloud. Overwhelms the smell of body odor and sweat that’s undoubtedly clinging to his scrawny carcass. He thinks that maybe he can catch a small whiff of nitroglycerin every so often. It’s sweet, but he knows better than to inhale. Junkrat is a headache all unto himself- doesn’t need to give himself another one on top of it. 

“HEY, ROADIE,” Junkrat bellows. “THERE’S A HUGE AND DELICIOUS HAMBURGER RIGHT BEHIND YOU.” 

He rolls his eyes. Not that Junkrat can see them behind the mask. 

He shifts. First time he’s moved in a while. Big mistake. He’s getting older, and he can’t sit still for hours without his spine getting stiff. His vertebrae crackle in protest. 

Junkrat’s face alights with pleasure. He’s acquired the attention he craves. Accomplished a previously impossible goal: Made Roadhog move. 

“What,” Roadhog grumbles. He’s upset at being shaken out of his thoughts. His own head is far better than Junkrat’s company. 

“I hear somethin’ rattlin’ in the bushes. I was thinkin maybe we could get some diiiiinner?” His voice turns up at the end of his sentence. Hopeful. He flutters his lashes coquettishly. “I’ve got traps! We could lay ‘em out-” 

“You ate already.” He’s ready to return to the sanctity of his own mind. Junkrat has other plans. 

“No, no! I mean, for you! Big guy like you’s gotta put on some calories.” He pats Roadhog’s stomach. Roadhog resists the urge to break his arm. “How much you gotta eat to maintain that figure, huh?” 

Not too much, really. He responds with a vague grunt. Looks upward, back at the sky. He could never accurately tell what time it was at night. Never learned how to tell time by the stars. He’s void of a watch. Needs to get one. 

He’s been zoning out so long he doesn’t know how many hours have elapsed since sunset. 

He decides it’s bedtime. He makes no official declaration of this. Just rolls out the sleeping bag he keeps strapped to the edge of his motorcycle and crawls in it.

“Wot? You’re sleeping  _ this early?”  _ Junkrat asks, incredulously. “It ain’t even witchin’ hour yet!” 

Was Junkrat timekeeping? Probably not. 

Roadhog curls on one side, mindful of his huge gut. Junkrat starts pushing at his lower back, insistent. Like a resentful child demanding attention. 

He’ll burn himself out. Junkrat can’t focus on one thing for too long unless it will explode, is currently exploding, or exploded in the past. Another one of his twitchy features that Roadhog’s fairly certain would’ve gotten better with medicine from the Time Before. 

He’s right. Junkrat gives up. Takes about two minutes of pushing, poking, and whining. But he gives up, nevertheless. There’s a quiet mutter of “whatever, I didn’t want you around anyway, you fat lug”. Then the shifting of him getting up. Peg-legged hobbling. A footstep and a thunk, in a rhythm. The soft settling sound, one of the weapons in Junkrat’s arsenal. A bear trap, with jagged fangs that could bite through a dingo’s leg and deep into a human’s. The brush of sand and metal. He’s burying the traps. He had  _ better  _ know exactly where he put them, and give some kind of warning. If he wakes up and gets metal scissoring into his leg when he tries to take a piss, he’s going to be very unhappy. 

Junkrat limps to his sidecar. Throws out his own bedroll with reckless abandon. Makes a soft thump as it lands in the sand. Junkrat hobbles over. Unrolls it. Lies down on top. He won’t be able to sleep, Roadhog predicts, but it’s not his damn problem. 

He tunes out the rustle of Junkrat’s skin on nylon. The wind whistling. The bushes’ creaking. The wasteland ambience slowly fades out.

He doesn’t realize he’s asleep until he’s awoken by screaming. 

He lunges out of his sleeping bag. Grabs the scrap shotgun he keeps clenched in his meaty fist whenever he sleeps. Head whips back and forth, assessing danger.

The screaming is a dingo. Its dusty golden coat is littered with boils, hairless patches, scars. Dozens of tumors of various sizes clump on one side of its throat, the size of a rugby ball. It forces the beast to keep its head constantly tilted to one side. 

It has a fifth foot on its left leg. Three extra toes dangle above the back foot, semi-formed. 

Junkrat is standing beside it. Like a proud father.

“DINNER!” He declares. Roadhog stares. He has eaten things that look worse. Every animal looks like food when you skin it, cut its meat into a formless hunk, cook it, and drown it in a dusty bottle of probably expired sauce. 

Junkrat gets impatient with his silence. He approximates Roadhog’s deep, muffled voice: “Thank you, Junkrat!” 

When Roadhog does not echo  _ thank you  _ back at him, Junkrat shrilly huffs. He’s mad. 

Roadhog shuffles over to the straining dingo. It makes a lunge at him. It can’t go far with its mangled foot. Trap’s staked into the ground. It screams again. 

No point in wasting meat. 

 


	2. A Burning Wind

There’s a  _ smell  _ in the air today.

It’s not so bad if he breathes into a filtered mask. But Junkrat doesn’t have one. So the scrapper whines. 

“What’cha reckon that is, huh?”

He knows exactly what that is. There must’ve been a town nearby, because that thick stench in the air- it’s death. Butchery of humans on a massive scale. The scent of burning and rotting flesh. Looters, he thinks. Looters ripped through a village and killed and burned everything they could reach. Living or dead. 

“Hog. Hoggie. C’mon. Snap outta it.” 

In the early days it was worse. Towns were never safe. Those that were too close to the omnium were wracked with radiation. Those that were far enough to not be affected by the explosion had a mass influx of fleeing survivors. Not enough medical supplies or food to go around. Not enough beds or water. The irradiated were stubborn, though. They were scared humans. And scared humans would do  _ anything  _ to survive. 

Sometimes it was driving out the original town inhabitants. Other times it was murder, plain and simple. Even more than that- Sometimes it was murder and worse. 

Screams burn his ears. 

“Hog!” 

Junkrat beats his tiny fists against Roadhog’s belly. Roadhog looks down at him, shaken from his thoughts. Junkrat beams. 

He backhands Junkrat, who goes sprawling. 

Junkrat shakes the blow off easily. Jumps back to attention like an eager mutt. 

His amber eyes glow with impish delight. He’s a leech. Feeds on attention, positive or negative. Corrective punishments- like that slap- don’t work. He shouldn’t have hit him. It’ll just make Junkrat put his hands him again when he wants attention, and that’s  _ not  _ what Roadhog wants to encourage.

“No touching,” Roadhog grunts. “Told you.” 

“What’m I sup _ -posed  _ to do when you keep starin’ off into space like that?” He whines. “What if we’re about to be attacked an’ I need to get your attention?” 

“We under attack?” Roadhog glances around at the empty landscape. 

“No!” The scrap rat bristles with a righteous indignation. “But I asked you a question and you didn’t answer! Rude!” 

Roadhog takes a second. He pretends to contemplate Junkrat’s question.

“Dunno,” He grunts. 

“Dunno what, mate?” Junkrat’s head tips, flighty. 

Irritation flickers through him. “What the smell is. Dunno.” 

“Oh,” Junkrat says. “Whatever it is, it’s bloody  _ awful,  _ huh? Huh?” 

He grunts in agreement. He stumps off back towards his bike. 

“You don’t talk much, do ya?” Junkrat pipes. He patters along after Roadhog, getting as close as Roadhog will allow without actually touching him. 

“No,” He replies. 

“Why not?” 

“Nothin’ to say,” He says. In truth, he doesn’t like the sound of his own voice. When he was younger it wasn’t so growly. But nowadays his windpipe is coated with the tar from smoking in his younger years and the dry dust that came up in great sheets off the irradiated landscape. His voice is unpleasant, discordant. Fit only for low growls and bullish bellows. 

He doesn’t like speaking carelessly, either. The more you say the more stupid you sound. Probably why even though Junkrat’s a first-rate chemist and a certifiable explosives genius, he still acts like a complete wanker and chatters uncontrollably. Consequently, he sounds like a gibbering idiot.

Roadhog has to be careful of that. He knows that Junkrat is dependant on those stronger than himself to survive, and he’s underhanded enough to manipulate the strong to do what he wants. Roadhog may not have Junkrat’s savant intelligence when it working on chemistry, but he’s not stupid or unobservant. He knows Junkrat’s trying to develop a symbiotic relationship with Roadhog for his own benefit, one that’ll probably get Roadhog killed. 

Fortunately, because he  _ knows  _ that, he’ll have a better chance of living. Junkrat’s mistake is assuming that Roadhog’s greedy enough to devalue his own life. Or stupid enough to not realize his only value to Junkrat is being muscle and meat shield. 

“What’cha mean? You’re old, you probably got a bunch to say!” 

Roadhog throws him a glare. Junkrat is undeterred. 

“Do you remember what it was like ‘fore everything blew up?” 

“No.” 

“How old are you?” He cheeps like a needy baby bird. 

“No.” 

“Didja know your hair’s grey?”

“No.” 

“Are you really old or is it just all dusty?” 

He really wishes Junkrat would get the hint already.

He kickstarts the bike. The engine roars to life. Junkrat quickly scrambles to get in the sidecar. Roadhog momentarily entertains the merits of throwing him out into the sand and speeding off. 

Junkrat brashly thunks his metal foot on the front of his sidecar- folds his arms behind his head and lounges. If he falls out, he’s going to get one hell of a road rash. 

The bike tears across the desert. The sputter of the engine is louder than anything Junkrat tries to say, so Roadhog can pretend he doesn’t see the young man’s lips move. 

At least until he sees a slender hand stretch out towards his stomach, tentative and mischievous. 

“Town nearby,” Roadhog bellows. “Going there.” 

The hand slowly recedes. 

 


End file.
